Eight years after the release of Sausage Party, Seth Rogen is revisiting the world of talking food with new series Sausage Party: Foodtopia.
The show follows up the war against humans that took place in the film, as hot dog Frank (voiced by Rogen, who is also an executive producer) and his grocery store friends establish a safe haven that quickly goes awry. Kristen Wiig, Michael Cera, David Krumholtz and Edward Norton reprise their voice roles, with Will Forte, Natasha Rothwell, Sam Richardson and Yassir Lester among the new additions.
“We always hoped to do more, honestly,” Rogen told The Hollywood Reporter at the Los Angeles premiere on Wednesday. “We kept thinking about it, we kept making jokes about it; it was a thing we kind of never stopped talking about and never stopped enjoying the idea of.”
Of opting to do a follow-up series rather than a sequel film, Rogen pointed to he and partner Evan Goldberg’s recent string of TV projects — including The Boys, Gen V and Invincible — that they “had really enjoyed.”
“I think television is so different than when we made the first movie and it allows for so much more in a lot of ways,” he explained. “I think for especially things like this, we can take much bigger swings with the show than we probably could with a movie creatively in a lot of ways and we have a lot more freedom and money than we would have in a movie version of this.”
The film was rated R, and the show continues in that raunchy vein. Asked if Amazon ever pushed back on the heavy sex and violence, Rogen joked, “If anything, they didn’t love how many food puns we were making, but other than that they were pretty OK with it. Amazon loves that. We’ve made them a lot of money with sex and violence,” in particular reference to The Boys.
Inside the screening, held at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Rogen stood alongside Wiig and Richardson and teased to the crowd, “It feels insane to thank people seriously for a show that is largely based on food fucking and food controlling people through their assholes, but that’s where we are right now,” before running through his list of collaborators.
He also joked, “This whole thing is like a labor of love for us, we work very hard on it, which is very sad given what it’s about and what happens in it. The amount of thought and energy and time that very lovely and smart people put into this show is, again, at times embarrassing.”
Sausage Party: Foodtopia is now streaming on Prime Video.
